


Just My (Blood) Type

by woojaes



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Blood, Fluff, M/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:56:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26994025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woojaes/pseuds/woojaes
Summary: "It's real blood? You're puttingreal bloodin red velvet cake?"Mark blinks behind his thin glasses, eyes wide. If his fingers and apron weren't covered in blood he would be cute, but in any other setting he would definitely look like a serial killer."It's a good egg substitute. And a natural red."
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 39
Kudos: 286
Collections: Challenge #2 — tricks; treats; and terrors





	Just My (Blood) Type

**Author's Note:**

> firstly, please forgive my brain for birthing this. secondly, thanks to my beta for helping me. enjoy!

It's the burnt caramel smell that does it. Overly sweet and sickly with the hint of charred sugar, Donghyuck steps into the bakery with his nose scrunched and a frown on his forehead. The interior doesn't help either, with very little natural light and _red lightbulbs_ in the ceiling and black and white floor tiles that subject any poor customer to hallucinations. Donghyuck swears he feels the corners of his eyes go fuzzy as he steps in, momentarily blinded. 

The heat is another thing, or lack thereof. His new coworkers, Mark and his parents who also happen to be his bosses, obviously prefer cooler temperatures; in between trying to avoid looking anywhere but straight ahead of him and breathing through his nose, he spots a thermometer on the glass counter reading ten degrees celsius and shivers a little. It's October and the weather is only just turning cold enough for sweaters, but the bakery feels particularly unpleasant.

Donghyuck doesn't really know what he was expecting from the worst rated bakery in the city, but, well, desperate times call for desperate measures.

There's a cake resting on top of the glass counter, or at least that's what it looks like. It's two tier but the bottom one doesn't even look strong enough to support itself, nevermind the smaller one on top, and when Donghyuck gets closer to it the dark red sponge peeks through a layer of _grey_ (not white) icing spread all around the edge, clumpy and patchy. 

Something about being here feels his insides with dread, but he can't quite figure out why.

Mark and his parents seem nice enough. When Donghyuck first walked in and handed over his resume a few days ago, Mark took the paper and stared at it with wide eyes before he took it to "the back" (which Donghyuck found out was just a kitchen area where they did the baking, and a small office next to it) and he held small, pleasant conversation until he was invited to an "interview" (which was really just his parents making sure he wasn't a criminal and that he could start right away).

If it's not the jarring interior, the October chill or the poorly decorated cakes, the final straw is the _taste_. The day after his interview, Donghyuck clocked in for his first shift at 7am. He paid for one of the croissants on display and took it to the office while he got ready. He wrapped the croissant in the paper bag it came in, lifted it to his lips and took a bite from the end, but spat it back out after only seconds. Instead of sugar, Mark and his family had used salt. Instead of soft, flaky pastry, it was thick and stodgy.

For lunch on his second day, he paid for sweet bagels he watched Mark make earlier. He had to look away before Mark could drop the dough into boiling water because a batch of brownies came out of the oven at the same time, but when he had his hands free again, the bagels were baking and they smelled _delicious._ So Donghyuck took his chance. He could forgive bad croissants; this was not a patisserie after all.

He bought two and took them to the kitchen, sliced them open with one of the sharp knives, and put the knife in the sink to be washed with all the other utensils later. The red on the blade could have come from tomato, cherry, raspberry, strawberry. Donghyuck paid it no mind. But when he bit into the bagel, sitting on the shitty computer chair in the office while he loaded Among Us on his phone, a sharp metallic taste filled his mouth and liquid dribbled down to the end of his chin. 

Apple and cinnamon bagels shouldn't explode. They shouldn't taste like blood. 

Donghyuck had to go home and brush his teeth vigorously, so much that – ironically – his gums started to bleed.

It's been almost a week. There are many things that Donghyuck doesn't like about this new job, most of them centred around the bakery itself, but coming to the realisation that his coworker and his parents are _vampires,_ well, that wasn't on his agenda, but does explain a few things at least.

"Mark, are you a vampire?" He decides asking outright is the best way of confirming it, except all it does is make Mark even more awkward than he already is. 

Mark fiddles with the bottle of red food colouring that he's pouring into cake batter, presumably for a red velvet cake. Donghyuck doesn't want to know if it's actually food colouring or something else. 

He doesn't actually expect Mark to answer, though. More than anything he hopes he's wrong. 

"Is it that obvious? What gave it away?" 

_What didn't,_ he wants to say. Instead he just stares, bewildered.

After a pause, Mark starts to beat the mixture in the bowl and turns it out into two greased circular tins when he's done. He gestures to the bottle, homemade label reading _red food colouring: keep cool._ "I promise, it's obtained ethically."

"It's real blood? You're putting _real blood_ in red velvet cake?"

Mark blinks behind his thin glasses, eyes wide. If his fingers and apron weren't covered in blood he would be cute, but in any other setting he would definitely look like a serial killer.

"It's a good egg substitute. And a natural red." 

Donghyuck gapes at him. "So is milk and vinegar. And you can use beets for the colour."

Mark just shrugs and seals the bottle, and puts it back inside one of the cupboards. He then licks any excess blood from his fingertips, and washes the rest under the faucets. "Vampires can't taste any of that stuff."

It is only when Donghyuck googles the name of the bakery later, half intrigued and half disgusted, that he realises he applied to – and now works at – a vampire bakery, catering not only to the undead but the unliving too (apparently poltergeists also need food, who'd've known?). Better Bat-ter Bakery is absolutely not subtle, so unsubtle in fact that Donghyuck can't believe he didn't figure it out before.

He feels even more ridiculous when he notices, for the first time ever, a sign above the front door. _This is a safe space_ , it reads. _We welcome all humans and creatures alike!_

How he – a warm blooded, healthy, alive _human_ – managed to get a job in the only supernatural hotspot this side of the city, maybe it's an act of fate. Or his worst nightmare. Who knows. Either way, Donghyuck definitely doesn't know what to do when he arrives at work and finds Mark already there (which makes sense, considering he probably doesn't sleep), injecting blood drops into brownies with a plastic syringe. 

He blinks. "Do you do this for all the things you bake?" 

Mark looks up. "Good morning," he says instead. "And no, just the vampire ones. The others are edible."

Donghyuck eyes a donut in the display cabinet, oozing with what _should_ be jam. It probably isn't. "What's the point of baking them if you're just going to inject blood into everything?"

Donghyuck didn't know it was possible for Mark to blush, but he does; a soft tinge fills his cheeks and he pauses, syringe in hand. "You know we can't always exist peacefully. We hide the blood inside human food so no one suspects a thing." 

It's not what Donghyuck expects Mark to say, but actually it tugs at his heartstrings. The 'edible' baked goods aren't really that edible either, at least not to Donghyuck's trained palette, but when most of their clientele are supernaturals with either enhanced or non-existent senses of taste, does it matter? Maybe Donghyuck was only hired to make the human food taste good, but that's okay. 

"Where do you even get it from? You don't… get it yourself, do you?"

Mark cracks a smile and presses his lips together as if trying to hide it. He puts the syringe down on the side and it leaks blood onto the glass top. Donghyuck grimaces. "We have an agreement with the hospital. The director is a vampire. We give him discounted bakes if he gives us blood bags once a month." 

Donghyuck has donated blood before. Regularly, actually. The thought of his own blood being baked into a loaf of bread kind of makes his skin crawl. 

"What about animals?"

Mark wipes the pool of blood from the glass counter with a tissue, then throws it into the trash, smile still tugging on his lips like a puppeteer. "It's not some Twilight shit," he says. "Animal blood tastes awful. Kinda sour. But human type AB tastes the best for me." 

Donghyuck shudders, deep down his spine. He wishes he could drain all the blood from his body and replace it with O, A or B. Anything else. 

"I know you're AB, I can smell it," Mark says in a casual voice like he's discussing the weather. "But don't worry, I won't bite you."

Comforting.

Working with a family of vampires is surprisingly easy, after Donghyuck's body adjusts to the eye-aching interior and unusual methods; another vampire, Jaemin, whose only clothes consists of Adidas shirts, pants and sneakers, comes in every Wednesday at 8am to collect a dozen cupcakes. He phones every Tuesday and orders an O filling, and it takes two full weeks for Donghyuck to stop feeling guilty as he stands in the kitchen with the same plastic syringe, squirting the liquid into the sponge.

It's easy, but _weird._ Other socially inept vampires comment how nice his blood smells when he's serving them which definitely isn't the compliment they think it is, but years in the customer service and food industries have taught Donghyuck a valuable lesson: just smile and nod. 

It changes, though, the day Donghyuck accidentally cuts himself in the kitchen. He's trying to grate chocolate but gets distracted by one of Mark's all-tooth smiles. It exposes his fangs which would normally make Donghyuck's neck itch uncomfortably, but lately he can't stop staring at them. Which is exactly what he's doing when he grates the slab of chocolate down to the last corner, and grazes his finger on the metal tool. It pinches the skin enough to cause the world's tiniest bleed. It doesn't even hurt.

But the spoon in Mark's hand clatters to the floor, sending meringue in all directions. For a brief second Donghyuck swears his eyes flash red and some part of his own life shortens just looking at it, but soon Mark holds a hand over his mouth and nose and turns away from him. "I don't mean to be rude," he says, voice strained. "But please, _please_ put a band-aid on that."

Donghyuck washes the cut under water, swiping dried chocolate from the skin too, and rummages around in cupboards for something to cover the wound with. He finds a box of expired Halloween patterned band-aids hidden somewhere in the back and loops one around the graze. Mark only relaxes when it's secured, stuck to his skin.

"So you can handle bags of fresh blood from the hospital, pour it into that little bottle of 'food colouring' you have, inject it into cakes and lick the excess from your fingers but you act like _that_ over a tiny cut?" Donghyuck crosses his hands over his chest, gesturing with a dip of his head to the soiled egg whites on the floor. Mark blushes once again, a warm pink that brings colour to his otherwise pale face.

"I'm desensitised to all that," he says with a frown. "I consume blood because I have to, not because I _like_ it."

Ah. A nerve. Donghyuck holds up the finger with the band-aid on it and threatens to peel it off. Mark startles.

"No! Please don't!" 

With a playful smile, Donghyuck clicks his fingers. Bingo. "You don't seem that desensitised to me." 

Mark doesn't answer and instead gets on his knees to wipe the mess from the floor, the tips of his ears red. For a second he looks almost human. But Donghyuck is nothing if not persistent.

"I've seen you use other AB blood, in that apple pie I made three days ago," he continues. Mark wipes frantically, the mess long gone. "So what is it, Mark?"

"It's nothing," he tries to protest, his voice small. 

"Is it _me_?" 

Mark's hands stop moving on the linoleum and he stands, takes the dirty cloth to the trash and throws it inside. He heaves a sigh.

One of the wonderful things about Mark Lee is his ability to completely exceed expectations. Donghyuck doesn't think Mark will give in so easily to his teasing, but apparently he is both charming and honest.

"Is it that obvious? What gave it away?" 

_What_ _didn't,_ Donghyuck wants to say. 

Instead, something in his chest stumbles, a skipped heartbeat, heard by the only vampire in the room. Mark's eyes go wide behind the frames. He looks cute like this, eyebrows shooting up into his hairline with the smallest of surprised smiles on his lips. 

“It’s nothing,” Donghyuck echoes. 

Mark nods, putting a clean spoon inside the bowl of egg whites. The blush from earlier paints his cheeks in a pretty rose shade and floods Donghyuck’s stomach with warmth. “Nothing,” he agrees. 

Mark turns back to the meringue and Donghyuck watches his every move, down to spooning it out onto a tray in peaks and sliding it into one of the ovens. They will be used to top B-positive tarts that he already made, now cooling in the fridge. 

It's easy and weird but surprisingly okay. Donghyuck will probably never get used to working at the bakery, particularly the handling blood thing that wasn't part of the job description, but he likes Mark and his cute little mannerisms and the way he gives Donghyuck tiny butterflies. Working with him every day is the icing on the cake. 

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/inj4nie?s=09).


End file.
